Brotherhood – Final Fantasy XV

(5 11-minute episodes released on the web on an unknown but presumably monthly schedule)

What’s it about ?

A glorified trailer for the next Final Fantasy game ; it won’t be out until September, so in the meantime SquareEnix starts hyping it up with this prologue broadcast on their Youtube channel.

Characters

Noctis is the (adopted ?) son/heir of the Lucis kingdom. He was on a road trip to his marriage when the nearby rival Empire invaded and conquered the kingdom. Since he has no real news about his family in the capital and wouldn’t be able to do much there anyway, he decided to keep on with his road trip to check on his fiancée.

Fortunately, he’s not alone, as he’s with three friends with more street smarts than him : Ignis the serious mother hen, Gladiolus the big guy who’s always mouthing off at the latter, and Prompto the hyper, younger one. And since they’re a FF hero party, the four of them are plenty enough to handle the dozens of robotic Empire shock troups on their way (although they’d rather avoid them as much as possible to get to their destination quickly).

Production Values

The bland competence that you’re used to see studio A1-Pictures bring to the table when they’re not particularly inspired. And of course the character designs are the kind of over-designed nonsense you get in FF games these days.

I really hope that the hordes of identical robots are supposed to barely react to our heroes and politely attack them one by one, because their behaviour certainly looks laughable.

What did I think of it ?

It’s utterly inoffensive, and instantly forgettable : the platonic ideal of the skippable prelude for hardcore completists of the franchise only. It does a decent job of sketching out the main characters and their quest, but not to the point of selling me on actually buying the game. It’s also doomed by the foreknowledge that it can’t resolve anything major, as that’s presumably the game’s job. (Especially as all I’ve heard about it is that it is wholly about those dudes’ road trip.)

I may get around to eventually watching the next few instalments of this… or just completely forget about it by the time they do come out.